The Whangie - with the Sunday Herald
I’ve been writing a weekly column in Scotland’s Sunday Herald newspaper for about 8/9 years so I thought I’d reproduce them, once published in the paper, here on the website. Here’s the first one, to a unique geological phenomenon that I first visited as a youngster…
The Whangie
Having moved away from the dear green place of Glasgow half a lifetime ago it’s always a pleasure to return to the city from time to time and appreciate again the abruptness of the dividing line between suburbs and glorious countryside.
For years I’ve maintained the best thing Edinburgh has going for it are the Pentlands, and similarly Glasgow has the Campsie Fells, that lovely, steep-sided and sprawling massif that used to dominate so much of my attention when I was a schoolboy. It was here I used to wander, lonely as a naive and innocent youngster with little notion of navigation or Gore-Tex waterproofs or safety skills or the potential consequences of a twisted ankle. It was here my pals and I climbed with old washing-line rope and slept under a tarpaulin wrapped in tartan blankets pinched from the house. We carried everything, including our bottles of Tizer, in an ancient Bergen that made our shoulders ache.
I couldn’t help smile at the memory when my wife and I drove out through Bearsden last weekend with the Campsies dominating our views. Out past Carbeth Inn, heaving with middle-aged bikers on a warm Sunday afternoon, and on towards the Stockie Muir with the car park at the Queen’s View full of well equipped and “properly” dressed walkers heading for the Whangie. Because our walk was a spur of the moment decision we were dressed in casual shirts, jeans and trainers – hope I’m not accused of setting a bad example…
By this time I was in full nostalgia mode – gazing across the Blane Valley to the great rounded upthrust of Dumgoyne and the rolling Campsies, across the flatlands of the Stockie Muir and the Carse of Stirling to the Highland Line with Ben Lomond rising dramatically from its island-studded loch. By this time we were plunging along a very wet and boggy path but one whose every turn and twist came back to me despite the gap of twenty-odd years since I last tramped here.
The Whangie is a geological phenomenon – a section of rocky hillside that has been pulled away from the main slope, resulting in a yawning ravine. It is, in fact, the result of “glacial plucking”. When the Stockie Muir and Auchineden Hill were covered in ice a glacier, moving ever so slowly, gradually pulled the frozen crag from the hillside, causing a fracture to form. In effect, the glacier tore the hillside apart, creating a long cavern between the two sections.
Today, the cleft is about a hundred metres in length and rises on both sides to a height of over a dozen metres. At one point the two walls are less than a metre apart. In less affluent days when young rock climbers didn’t have the means of travelling to the highlands, they climbed here on the steep sides of the Whangie. I climbed my very first VS (Very Severe) route here and for a short period of my life the Whangie seemed like a second home.
Like rock climbing routes, certain walking areas become fashionable from time to time, but I was surprised at the large number of people who were walking here. The Whangie was a popular destination for ramblers throughout the early 20th century and at the end of the 19th century a columnist in Glasgow’s Evening Citizen, Hugh MacDonald, described the phenomenon as a “vast section of the hill that has been wrenched asunder, leaving a lengthened and deepened chasm yawning along the line of separation. The projections of one side (of the ravine),” he continued, “correspond with singular exactness to the hollows of the other.”
There were no rock climbers around when we reached the walls of the Whangie and it didn’t take me long to realise my old rock climbing skills, such as they were, had abandoned me, but it was fun to clamber around on the easier routes for a hour or so enjoying the views out to Loch Lomond and across Dunbarton Muir to Durncrooks Reservoir. The Whangie is simply a great place to be on a warm Sunday afternoon.
We returned by the lower path, recalling the less prosaic description of the Whangie’s origins. After hosting a particularly successful meeting of warlocks and witches somewhere on the Kilpatrick Hills, Auld Nick was flying to another meeting when, feeling rather pleased with himself, he flicked his tail in joy, tearing apart the hillside over which he was flying. And thus, The Whangie was created…
Map: OS 1:50,000 Sheet 64
Distance: 3 miles
Approx Time: 2 hours
Start/Finish: Queen’s View car park on the A809 Drymen road
Route: Leave the car park, cross a stile over a wall, cross the burn and follow the duckboards uphill. Continue climbing on the broad path until you reach a dilapidated ladder stile. Cross the stile and continue uphill, following the higher level path to the summit trig point of Auchineden Hill. From here continue in a NW then W direction to reach the end of The Whangie. From here a path returns on a lower route to the old ladder stile and the outward path from the car park.